An alternate theory

As a writer working on a story about an accident investigation, my goal is to present the facts and let the reader decide whether or not the conclusions of the NTSB and Boeing were correct or not. I want to tell the story of what happened in a compelling but unbiased way. The evidence presented on this site is the same evidence the NTSB investigators used in their investigation.

As I review the evidence it is clear to me that there is nothing that corroborates the NTSB’s findings of probable cause. One of the reasons that the investigation ended as it did, with the NTSB pointing the finger at the crew despite a lack of supporting evidence to back up that claim, is because they couldn’t come up with an alternate theory. They had spent two years investigating this incident and at the end of two years they still couldn’t say with any certainty what had happened. The investigators then relied on the one relief they had which was to release a “probable cause” finding. In other words, this is what we think happened.

The crew of TWA 841 was stuck with the stigma of having caused a near fatal crash because Boeing and the NTSB said so. Fortunately for the crew, there were a number of people who decided to take another look at the upset and the evidence. One person who reviewed the evidence was a former aeronautical engineer for Grumman Aerospace by the name of Duane Yorke.

Duane reviewed the evidence and came up with an alternate theory of what had happened to TWA 841. Whereas none of the evidence supports the NTSB theory of the upset, all of the evidence fits the alternate theory. I won’t go through that evidence point by point right now, but in the video below John Rohlfing, who was the TWA Accident Investigative Committee Chairman at the time this alternate theory was first proposed, explains how the new theory better fits the evidence.